How to Optimize Your Hotel’s Metasearch Campaigns for Mobile Devices
Google Search started prioritizing mobile first back in 2016 as visitation and growth from users on mobile devices started growing. As of 2023, almost 60% of traffic on the web is from mobile devices. Visibility on mobile devices is crucial if your hotel wants to be present during important parts of the consumer journey to purchase. GCommerce’s portfolio of hotel websites sees over 66% of all traffic coming from mobile devices.
Hotel metasearch campaigns have become an increasingly important part of this journey, especially on Google search. It’s powering new SERP features visible down the continuous scroll page, such as this newer hotel listing feature (with rates from hotel ads) under organic listings shown below.
Learn how your hotel can best approach optimizing your hotel ads and metasearch for this device type and ensure you have the right visibility to reach your goals.
How do I optimize my hotel’s metasearch ad campaigns for mobile devices?
Campaign Adjustments
Metadesk recommends optimizing your hotel metasearch campaigns based on performance by segment based on your hotel’s objectives. Some platforms, such as Google Hotel Ads offer the ability to use a bid modification by device type. You can also opt out of certain device types on channels such as Google and TripAdvisor altogether. You can view reporting on how each device type performs in terms of clicks, bookings, impression share, and more within metasearch management platforms to better understand how each device type segment performs before making any specific adjustments.
Optimize Your Landing Page for Mobile Devices
An important part of your hotel’s metasearch performance is the booking engine landing page where the traffic lands. Although most hotels work with 3rd party providers, making it hard to have control over things like page speed - optimizing this experience can improve performance from mobile traffic in your metasearch campaigns. Make sure your mobile booking page is easy to navigate on a mobile device. You could also test mobile-only offers or last-minute deals to appeal to mobile device users, many of whom tend to be more likely to be last-minute bookers than desktop users.
Optimize For Local Search + Your Google Business Profile Listing
A critical part of your Google Hotel Ads’ visibility in Google search results is how well you’re focused on local SEO ranking signals. This includes how built out and up-to-date your Google Business Profile listing is, how many reviews your hotel has vs the competition, making sure you're responding to reviews, and more.
What device type drives the most bookings for hotel metasearch?
Although mobile devices account for over 60% of site traffic on average, this traffic tends to be higher in the funnel during the consumer path to purchase. On average, mobile devices only account for 30% of a hotel’s total website revenue production. The trend is the same as we look specifically at hotel metasearch campaign production. GCommerce’s portfolio sees 58% of all hotel metasearch clicks come from mobile devices but only 35% of total revenue.
This data can help you optimize your budget allocation.
If you are limited on budget for these typically bottom-of-funnel campaigns and focused on driving higher impression share to the segments that produce more revenue, you might opt to increase bid adjustments for desktop or decrease them for mobile traffic.
Remember, though, even though most bookings come via desktop - it’s important to be visible on mobile since that’s where consumers are spending most of their time (and clicks) interacting with your campaigns while they are shopping and considering which hotel to stay at in a destination - they just tend to book on desktop. If you remove visibility and impressions from mobile, you might end up hurting your overall performance due to lowered visibility.
